About

David Jarmul writes Not Exactly Retired, chronicling the adventures he and his wife, Champa, have been pursuing since mid-2015, when he stepped down as the head of news and communications for Duke University. (His colleagues sent him off with this amazing video.)

David previously held senior communications positions at the National Academy of Sciences and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He and Champa met when he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, in the same school where Champa was teaching.

Married in 1979, they have been living for many years in Durham, N.C. They have two sons and daughters-in-law and six grandchildren. In June 2016, they began serving as volunteers with the Peace Corps in Moldova, in eastern Europe.

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11 thoughts on “About”

Hi David, My name is Akaisha Kaderli from Retire Early Lifestyle. I like your post about volunteering in Moldova as an older Peace Corps member. May we reprint it on our site with your permission? Let us know. Our email address is below. Thanks!

Hi Akaisha and many thanks for your message. My apologies for not responding faster. I would be very pleased if you and Billy reprinted the post. Please do include an attribution and link to the original post. Thanks indeed.

Christina, thank you for the kind message. If “join you” means following along with our adventures, I invite you to subscribe (free!) on the blog’s home page. If you are responding to my recent post about older people joining the Peace Corps, you’ll see a link there to a special Peace Corps website for 50+ applicants. Either way, thanks!

Hi David, I have started following your blog. I am trying to start a blog of my own but am new to this business of blogging and am finding some difficulties. Would you mind sharing your email address with me, (or responding to my email address) so I could converse with you directly? Thanks Joyce H-G

Hi Bob, and thanks for your message. From your own blog, I’m guessing you’re especially interested in the post about Hour of Code and teaching coding to kids. I’d encourage you to look at the Hour of Code site, which you probably already know about. My Peace Corps colleague, Sara Hoy, has been my guide in this; her excellent blog is at https://sarajoyhoy.com. If you’re asking about Peace Corps more generally, please look at my earlier posts, or at the Peace Corps site. Again, thanks for reaching out to me.

Thanks for the reply. I actually teach computer science in middle school, and we do all kinds of cool stuff with coding and robots. So my classes are way past hour of code! My interest is in the Peace Corps part of your story. If you’d like to discuss it off-blog, I’m bobirv AT gmail. Thanks again!

Hi David, Hope you both are enjoying the transition to a new/old life. Mona would like a snailmail address for Champa. You can send to wdshaw@verizon.net. All is well on this side of the Pond (if you discount the election). Will

David: To promote the story of the Peace Corps through nonfiction, fiction and poetry is the central reason why Marian Haley Beil and I –both PCVs in Ethiopia 1962-64–started Peace Corps Writers & Readers back in the Seventies and continue that mission today on this website: http://www.peacecorpsworldwide.org. We would love to have you write something for our site. John

On Friday, the U.S. ambassador and other guests celebrated the new costumes Champa and her Ialoveni school partners created over the past several months — a colorful and emotional day we will never forget. This video is also on YouTube.

Three Ialoveni girls took second prize nationally in the 2018 Diamond Challenge Moldova competition for young entrepreneurs. I mentored the team, which produced a Facebook site to help teenagers learn about careers. The video is also on YouTube.

Student teams from across Moldova battle with “SumoBots” they built and programmed. Our Ialoveni library team participated in this educational competition at Tekwill in Chișinău. The video is also viewable on YouTube.

Thanks for reading this blog, which follows the journey of Champa and David Jarmul since we walked away from our conventional life in mid-2015 to pursue a new "not exactly retired" life of service and adventure. It begins with our trips across the United States and Nepal, followed by our current service as Peace Corps volunteers in Moldova, in eastern Europe. We hope you enjoy "Not Exactly," no matter your own age or where you live. Click "About" to learn more.